April Embers_A Second Chance Single Daddy Firefighter Romance Read online

  “Umm… is everything ok, Kas?”

  “More,” she gasped, shoving the wine glass in front of me. “I need more.”

  I frowned. I hadn’t even filled up my own glass, and Kas was already asking for round two?

  Whatever…

  I poured a second serving of wine into her glass, then filled my own.

  “Cheers,” I remarked under my breath as I took a sip.

  “Mmm,” Kas murmured as she swallowed half of her second glass of wine. She thrust the glass down dramatically, then adjusted her black sunglasses.

  “I needed that,” she said. “Thank you, Des.”

  “Umm… sure. Anytime?”

  “I needed that,” she said again, “Because what I’m about to say is very difficult for me, but it needs to be said.”

  She clutched a manicured hand to her chest dramatically and made a heavy, pained sigh.

  “Kas… is everything ok?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I’m fine, I’m fine. But…” she shook her head and raised the wine glass, dumping the entire contents down her throat with one glug.

  I raised the bottle, silently offering a refill, but Kas shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I just need to say it. I need to rip off the band-aid. That’s what my shrink always tells me. He says, ‘Kas, just find your voice… just be the brave, courageous woman I know you can be!’”

  Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what your shrink says… I rolled my eyes in disbelief. Luckily, Kas didn’t seem to notice.

  She took another deep breath, then she slid off her sunglasses.

  “Desiree, there isn’t an easy way to say this…” she said. “So, I’m just going to say it.”

  “Ok.”

  “You need to move out.’

  “That’s-- wait, what?!”

  “Oh God, I knew this was going to be hard for me to do,” Kas turned away and immediately began fanning her face with her hands. “I can’t cry! I just paid $280 to get these eyelashes, and if I cry, they’ll all fall out!”

  “Kas, I don’t understand,” I stammered, slamming my wine glass down on the counter.

  “Please don’t make this harder on me than it already is,” Kas said, holding up her hand to stop me.

  “Well maybe it would be less hard, if I actually understood what was going on?”

  “I already told you,” she groaned. “I need you to move out. Like, ASAP.”

  “But… we still have six months left on our lease!”

  “My lease,” she snapped. “My name is on the lease.”

  Technically she was right, Kas had found the apartment, then I had found Kas on CraigsList. The lease had been in her name, but I had assumed that it was updated when I moved in...

  “My name is on the lease, too,” I insisted. “You told me that you contacted the landlord and had my name added to the lease agreement.”

  Kas huffed out another sigh and shook her head.

  “I never did that,” she said.

  “But you told me that you--”

  “I lied,” she shrugged.

  “Why would you lie about something like that?!”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Maybe that’s something I should talk about with my shrink…”

  “I can’t believe this,” I murmured, sinking my fingers through my hair and shaking my head.

  “Desiree, I can see that you’re upset,” Kas said in a completely non-empathetic voice. “But really, you should be happy for me.”

  “Happy? For you?!”

  “Yes,” Kas nodded. “This is just a speed bump in the road towards my happiness.”

  “Your… happiness?!”

  “I found love, Desiree,” Kas said. “I met someone and he’s going to be moving in, and--”

  “Wait,” I held up my hands. “You’re kicking me out because of some guy you just met?!”

  “You’re clearly upset,” Kas sighed. “This isn’t the reaction I was expecting.”

  “What were you expecting?! You’re kicking me out of our apartment!”

  “My apartment…” Kas snipped under her breath.

  Unbelievable, I thought to myself, shaking my head. Unbe-fucking-lievable.

  “So… according to Google, I’m technically supposed to give you a thirty-day eviction notice,” Kas said. “But I was kinda hoping that you could, like, having all your stuff out of here within the next week? Stuart wants to start moving his stuff in next weekend--”

  “No,” I said firmly. “Absolutely not. I will be taking the full thirty days, thank you very much.”

  Kas blinked at me, and for one vengeful second I wished that she would cry, just so her $280 bullshit eyelash extensions would drip off. But she didn’t cry. Instead, she just sighed and reached for my wine glass on the counter.

  “That’s my wine!” I snapped, snatching the wine glass away from her grasp.

  Then, wine glass in hand, I stomped towards the coffee table and plopped myself down to grade the remainder of my essays.

  Suddenly my AP students’ abysmal attempts to describe Newspeak didn’t seem quite so bad...

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE | RORY

  It was a Friday night and, for the first time since I had moved back to Hartford, I had the apartment all to myself. Charlie had been invited to a slumber party with a few of her new friends from school, and she had already packed up Frozen pajamas and toothbrush into an overnight bag before I even had a chance to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

  I wasn’t sold on the idea, but after an entire evening of puppy-dog pouts and pleading, I had finally given in.

  Besides… Charlie wasn’t the only one with big plans for Friday night.

  I checked the time on my watch. 6,30 p.m., on the dot. I climbed out of the Challenger and tapped the locks, then I strutted towards Marcy’s Diner.

  As soon as I pushed through the door, I was greeted by the sticky stench of waffle batter and bacon grease. Grease that, most likely, had been caked on the fryer in the kitchen for at least thirty years. And that’s probably a generous approximation.

  A waitress in a retro blue smock was hunched over the hostess station playing Candy Crush on her iPhone, and she didn’t bother glancing up at me when I stepped inside.

  “Sit anywhere,” she said, waving a hand at the room full of empty booths and tables.

  I aimed straight for a booth at the back of the restaurant. It had been over a decade since I had last visited Marcy’s, but that booth hadn’t changed at all, the benches were still covered in faded red vinyl, and the glass orb-shaped light hanging over the table still had a crack running all the way up one side.

  I slid into the booth and made the mistake of resting my elbows on the table, only to discover that they were coated in some sort of sticky residue.

  I guess we’re really getting the full Marcy’s experience tonight…

  The metal chimes on the front door twinkled, and when I glanced up I saw Des stepping into the restaurant.

  She was wearing a little white sundress and a denim jacket. Her black hair was damp and tousled into a messy mane of curls.

  It didn’t matter how many times I saw her… she took my breath away every damn time. And when I thought about the way I’d devoured that sweet pussy in the swimming pool, I felt my cock rise to attention, too.

  Her eyes landed straight on my booth in the back. Well, technically it was our booth. Des and I had a history with Marcy’s Diner… with this booth, in particular.

  “Hey stranger,” she cooed as she sauntered towards me. “You come here often?”

  “That was supposed to be my line,” I grinned back, keeping my eyes locked on her as she ducked down onto the vinyl bench across the booth from me.

  “God, I haven’t been here in years,” she said, glancing around the diner. “But somehow, it’s exactly the way I remember it. Isn’t it funny how some things change, and some things stay exactly the same?”r />
  “I’m starting to realize that, yeah,” I said as I plucked up a pair of laminated menus that were wedged behind a paper napkin dispenser and syrup bottle at the edge of table.

  “A menu?” Des raised her eyebrows. “You mean… we’re not ordering the usual?”

  “Good point,” I conceded, dropping the menus back behind the napkin holder. “Double order of cheesy fries and a chocolate malt?”

  “Two straws,” Des grinned. Her cheeks turned a soft shade of pink and she pressed her lips together to stop herself from smiling.

  “It’s ok to smile sometimes, you know,” I teased. “Especially when it’s a good smile, like yours.”

  Des bit down harder on her lips and her dimples popped in.

  “Ditto,” she said. Then she nodded at my Sisters of Mercy t-shirt and added, “Mr. Always-Wearing-Black.”

  I let myself smile at that, then I stood up from the booth and walked to the bar to place our order. When I got back to the table I slid into the vinyl seat and grinned at Des, stroking my chin through my beard.

  “So… what do you remember most about this place?” I asked.

  “What do I remember most?” she repeated thoughtfully as she gazed around the old diner. Then her face got serious, and she lowered her eyes to stare at the sticky tabletop.

  “I remember that night,” she said. “The night I found my mom.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just listened, hands folded on the table in front of me.

  “We were in middle school,” she said. “It was winter time, and I had spent an entire week using the computers in the school library tracking down the phone number and address of every single person with my mother’s name in the United States…”

  From the diner’s kitchen, I could hear the bubbling hiss of fryer grease and a blender whirring, but other than that the restaurant was totally silent. It was just the two of us; just Des and I.

  “I wanted to call each and every one of them, until I found her,” Des continued, “But I couldn’t use the phone at my dad’s house. I knew he’d figure it out once he saw the phone bill… so I decided to use a payphone. And the only payphone in town…”

  “...was the one right over there,” I finished for her. I pointed to the opposite corner of the diner, where a glass phone booth had been built next to the bar. The phone was still intact, and a frayed old copy of the Hartford Yellow Pages was zip-tied to the wall of the booth.

  “You tried to talk me out of it,” Des said.

  “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I just wanted to find her…” Des shook her head, eyes glazing over as they locked onto the booth. “You thought it was a bad idea, but you still came here with me. You brought a Ziploc bag full of quarters for the phone, and you sat here and waited while I dialed every number on the list…”

  “There must have been dozens and dozens of phone numbers, and they were from all over the place, California, Arkansas, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon…” she shifted her eyes down towards her hands. “Every time I called a different number, I imagined a different version of my mother. I imagined my mom eating guacamole with movie stars on the beach in California, or living on a farm and baking apple pies in Arkansas, or being married to a fisherman and working at a lobster shack in Maine--”

  The waitress in the mint-blue smock stomped to the edge of our table and thunked down a frosted shake glass filled with thick chocolate malt.

  “One chocolate malt, two straws,” she barked, dropping a pair of paper-wrapped straws on the table between us. Then she turned on her heel and left us alone again.

  “There was one thing that every version of my mother had in common,” Des said. “They all wanted me back.”

  I swallowed heavily because I knew what came next. Des did, too. She sighed, reaching across the table for the straws. She tore away the paper wrapper and stabbed the straw into the malt, then she brought it to her lips and tried to suck. Nothing happened.

  “Too soon,” I teased gently. “You gotta let it thaw, first.”

  Des sighed, pushing the malt away.

  “You sat right here,” she said, pushing the malt away. “You waited for me while I stuffed quarters into the payphone and dialed number after number…”

  Des wrapped the paper straw wrapper around her fingers, looping it over and over until she cut off the circulation and her fingertips started to turn white.

  “Some of them just hung up on me. Some of them got angry and threatened to report me to the cops if I tried calling them again. Some of them just laughed…” her voice was growing softer and softer. “But I didn’t care. None of them were my mother.”

  I reached across the table and snapped the straw wrapper, breaking the hold it had on her fingers. The blood supply immediately returned to her fingertips, and I wrapped my hand around hers and held onto it.

  “I was getting closer and closer to the bottom of the list, but I wasn’t ready to give up. I knew she was out there, somewhere....” Des continued. Her brow wrinkled together and her eyes remained cast downward, locked on our interwoven hands. “It was a Virginia phone number. Waverly, Virginia. I still know the phone number, by heart, but I’m sure she’s changed it by now…”

  I squeezed her hand, and her eyes pinched shut as her frown deepened.

  “As soon as she said ‘hello,’ I knew it was her. Which doesn’t make any sense, because I was just a baby when she left. I was too young to remember the sound of her voice… but somehow, when she picked up the phone that night, I just knew it was her.”

  “I immediately starting crying and I forgot everything that I had planned on saying. The only thing I could say was ‘Mom?’”

  I tightened my grip around her hand and rubbed her knuckles with my thumb. Des was silent for several seconds as she waded through the emotions resurging inside of her. Then she licked her lips and continued,

  “She didn’t ask me how I was doing, or if I was happy. She didn’t ask anything about me. She just wanted to know where I was calling from, and whether or not my father knew that I had found her.”

  A single tear bubbled through her eyelashes and rolled down her cheek, leaving a silvery trail that she didn’t bother brushing away.

  “Then her voice got very flat. There was no emotion… she was just calm. She told me, ‘Desiree, you can’t call this number again. You can’t try to contact me again.’ She made me promise… and then she hung up.”

  Des sunk back into the booth and sighed. She blinked her eyes open and gazed up at the water-stained ceiling tiles, and the crack in the glass light fixture…

  “I started sobbing in the phone booth,” Des recalled. “My knees gave out, but you caught me. You wrapped your arms around me and you carried me back to this table. You sat by my side, and you held onto me until I had cried every last tear I had.”

  “You offered to walk me home, but I didn’t want to go,” she sniffed. “So we sat here all night. That bag of payphone quarters was the only money we had… and it was just enough for a double order of fries. We had to split the chocolate malt; two straws.”

  After that night, it had become a tradition. We would walk to Marcy’s after school or sneak there late at night. Every time, our order was exactly the same, fries and a chocolate malt, always paid for in spare change.

  “I still remember the number, you know,” Des said, chuckling through the tears that glistened in the folds of her eyes. “After all of these years… I still remember that fucking phone number.”

  “Did you ever try calling it again?” I asked.

  “I thought about it,” Des admitted. “But I didn’t want to hurt her. She was obviously still terrified of the life she left behind in Hartford… of my father.”

  Des sighed, pressing her lips together sadly.

  “After he passed away, I thought about trying again,” she said. “Sometimes I would even get as far as dialing the first few digits of her phone number into my cell… but
I always chickened out. I didn’t see the point of trying again.”

  Still, as Desiree’s eyes traced back to the phone booth in the corner of the diner, I saw a flicker of curiosity ripple through her face.

  I reached into the pocket of my Levi’s and fished out a pair of quarters, then I dropped them on the table.

  “Do you want to try?” I asked.

  Des glanced down at the shiny silver quarters, then back at the phone booth.

  “No,” she said softly, shaking her head. “It’s taken me nearly my entire life, but I think I’ve finally made peace with it. My mother ran away because she was scared and didn’t know what else to do. Leaving wasn’t a choice… but staying away was. She chose to stay away. She chose to give up on me, and I have to accept that.”

  “You could say the same thing about me,” I said, squeezing her hand.

  Her eyes flicked up and met mine, and she stared at me sincerely for several seconds before shaking her head.

  “You never gave up on me, Rory,” she said without taking her eyes away from mine. “You came back.”

  The waitress scuttled back to our table and dropped a plate piled high with greasy, golden french fries drenched in neon orange liquid cheese between the two of us.

  “Careful, it’s hot,” she mumbled.

  Des wrinkled her nose and smiled down at the heap as the stench of hot grease and canned cheese wafted up from the mess of fries.

  “This is absolutely disgusting,” I chuckled.

  “No,” Des shook her head. “What’s ‘absolutely disgusting’ is that we used to polish off this whole damn plate.”

  “In that case, we better dig in. We can’t head to our next stop until this plate is clean.”

  “Next stop?” Des repeated, frowning. “We’re going somewhere after this?”

  “Oh yeah,” I grinned. “We’ll be making a few stops tonight, actually…”

  ***

  The sun was starting to set by the time we finished our french fries and chocolate malt, and the streets of downtown Hartford were already crowded with Friday night foot traffic. Pedestrians shuffled in and out of restaurants and bars, and the warm air was flooded with the smell of food and beer.